Brad Ideas - burning manhttp://ideas.4brad.com/taxonomy/term/59/all
enBurning Man 2006 Galleryhttp://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2006-gallery
<p>It&#8217;s way late, but I finally put captions on my gallery of regular-aspect photos from Burning Man 2006.</p>
<p><a href=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm06><img src=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm06/burn/thumb/IMG_8119.JPG class=blogpic></a></p>
<p>Some time ago I put together the <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman06.html" title="reference on 2006 Panoramas" target="_self">2006 Panoramas</a> but just never got around to doing the regulars. There are many fun ones here, an particular novel are the ones of the <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm06/burn/" title="reference on burn" target="_self">burn</a> taken from above it on
a boomlift.</p>
<p>I also did another aerial survey, but that remains unfinished. Way too much processing to do, and Google did a decent one in google maps. I did put up a few such photos there.</p>
<p>Enjoy the <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm06/" title="reference on 2006 Burning Man Photos" target="_self">2006 Burning Man Photos</a>.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2006-gallery#commentsBurning ManPhotographyburning manThu, 12 Jul 2007 15:26:07 -0700brad630 at http://ideas.4brad.comHard work for Burning Man to be Greenhttp://ideas.4brad.com/hard-work-burning-man-be-green
<p>This year&#8217;s theme for Burning Man is &#8220;the Green Man.&#8221; It represents a lot of things. For many it just is an inspiration for art centered on nature or the environment. Others are taking it as a signal to try to be better environmentally. That&#8217;s going to be a very tough road for a festival centered on building a temporary city far from everything and pyrotechnic art.</p>
<p>So I wrote up some thoughts on the challenges involved. The toughest problem is that transporting an entire city to the desert and then taking it back is a great personal and artistic endeavour, but not one that can be considered green. All efforts to reduce the pollution at the event are dwarfed by the fuel burned to get there. So what can be done?</p>
<p>Read about the <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/burn/green.html">problems of having a green man</a>.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/hard-work-burning-man-be-green#commentsBurning ManGoing Greenburning manThu, 22 Mar 2007 01:34:31 -0700brad542 at http://ideas.4brad.comSome early panoramas of the burn itselfhttp://ideas.4brad.com/some-early-panoramas-burn-itself
<p>While it will be a while before I get the time to build all my panoramas of this year&#8217;s Burning Man, I did do some quick versions of some of those I shot of the burn itself. This year, I arranged to be on a cherry picker above the burn. I wish I had spent more time actually looking at the spectacle, but I wanted to capture panoramas of Burning Man&#8217;s climactic moment. The entire city gathers, along with all the art cars for one shared experience. A large chunk of the experience is the mood and the sound which I can&#8217;t capture in a photo, but I can try to capture the scope.</p>
<p><a href=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman06.html><img width=97% src=
http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/thumb/conflag22.jpg></a></p>
<p>This thumbnail shows the man going up, shooting fireworks and most of the crowd around him. I will later rebuild it from the raw files for the best quality.</p>
<p>Shooting panoramas at night is always hard. You want time exposures, but if any exposure goes wrong (such as vibration) the whole panorama can be ruined by a blurry frame in the middle. On a boomlift, if anybody moves &#8212; and the other photographer was always adjusting his body for different angles &#8212; a time exposure won&#8217;t be possible. It&#8217;s also cramped and if you drop something (as I did my clamp knob near the end) you won&#8217;t get it back for a while. In addition, you can&#8217;t have everybody else duck every time you do a sweep without really annoying them, and if you do you have to wait a while for things to stabilize.</p>
<p>It was also an interesting experience riding to the burn with DPW, the group of staff and volunteers who do city infrastructure. They do work hard, in rough conditions, but it gives them an attitude that crosses the line some of the time regarding the other participants. When we came to each parked cherry picker, people had leaned bikes against them, and in one case locked a bike on one. Though we would not actually move the bases, the crew quickly grabbed all the bikes and tossed them on top of one another, tangling pedal in spoke, probably damaging some and certainly making some hard to find. The locked bike had its lock smashed quickly with a mallet. Now the people who put their bikes on the pickers weren&#8217;t thinking very well, I agree, and the DPW crew did have to get us around quickly but I couldn&#8217;t help but cringe with guilt at being part of the cause of this, especially when we didn&#8217;t move
the pickers. (Though I understand safety concerns of needing to be able to.)</p>
<p>Anyway, things &#8220;picked up&#8221; quickly and the view was indeed spectacular. Tune in later for more and better pictures, and in the meantime you can see <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman06.html">the first set of trial burn panoramas</a> for a view of the burn you haven&#8217;t seen.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/some-early-panoramas-burn-itself#commentsBurning ManPhotographyburning manFri, 08 Sep 2006 12:24:07 -0700brad449 at http://ideas.4brad.comBurning Man 2005 Panoramashttp://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2005-panoramas
<p>Hot on the heels of the <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm05/">regular photos</a> the gallery of
<a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman05.html">2005 Burning Man Panoramas</a> is now up. This year, I
got to borrow a cherry picker at sunset on Friday for some interesting perspectives. The long ones
are around 3400 by 52000 at full res (180 megapixels) and even the ones on the web are larger than
before. Use F11 to put your browser into full screen mode.</p>
<p>This year I switched most of my generation to Panorama Factory, which in its latest verions has allowed
fine control of the blending zone, so I can finally use it to deal with moving people in scenes.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a view of the temple, mostly because it has the narrowest thumbnail.</p>
<p><a href=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman05.html><img src=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/thumb/temple-side.jpg></a></p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2005-panoramas#commentsBurning ManPhotographyburning manSun, 16 Jul 2006 23:48:30 -0700brad430 at http://ideas.4brad.comBurning Man 2005 Photos plus Aerial shotshttp://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2005-photos-plus-aerial-shots
<p><img align=left style="padding:12px" src=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm05/scenes/thumb/IMG_4763.JPG>
I&#8217;ve gotten way behind on putting up my photographs, and I realized I had never put my Burning Man 2005 shots up. We&#8217;re already planning for 2006.</p>
<p>So I got them up this weekend. Of particular interest to burners this year will be the aerial survey I did of the city, over 200 close-up photos of just about every camp in the city from the sky.</p>
<p>And yes, I shot plenty of panoramas, and I have built most of them, but still don&#8217;t have the panorama page up.</p>
<p>So take a visit to my <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm05/">2005 Burning Man Photos</a>.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/burning-man-2005-photos-plus-aerial-shots#commentsBurning ManPhotographyburning manTue, 04 Jul 2006 23:59:37 -0700brad425 at http://ideas.4brad.comPlaya phone at Burning Manhttp://ideas.4brad.com/playa-phone-burning-man
<p>If you noticed a long break in the blogging, it&#8217;s because I was at Burning Man. And while people do blog from Burning Man, it&#8217;s not what you want to spend your time doing. I will have more entries in the future, but let me relate some stories of the network and the phone booth first.</p>
<p><img align=right src=http://www.templetons.com/images/playaphone-info.jpg>
Last year, we erected a free <a href="http://www.templetons.com/pq/">phone booth in the desert</a> to great results. This year, it was going to be even better because of a plan for a new internet connection. In the past, John Gilmore had brought his satellite dish, which had all the latency and bandwidth limits of satellite. This year he splurged on getting a microwave link in, which will be even faster next year. Sadly, much of that money was wasted because we never got the &#8220;first mile&#8221; &#8212; the on-playa 802.11 network &#8212; operating at a satisfactory level. There was huge packet loss and jitter in most places, when it was up at all. Next time some of the money will go into better equipment and planning for the local network.</p>
<p>As such, the phone booth, located in our camp on 7:30, only worked intermittently and rarely with great voice quality. We eventually decided to sacrifice the aesthetic purity of a booth sitting in the desert, connected to nothing, and moved it on its wagon by trike to the center camp, home of the incoming microwave link. The we set it up on the street, with an ethernet wire snaking in. We were no longer wireless, but the voice quality was top notch. I wasn&#8217;t able to spend much time with it but reports were that the line got very long at times.</p>
<p>In our own camp, you could tell if it was working or not based on whether there was a line. Even waiting for it to work was better than the 2-3 hour time investment of taking the bus to the phone booth in Gerlach.</p>
<p>Last year, I recounted the emotional experience people had using an unexpected and impossible phone to hear the voices of loved ones. This year, this was magnified by Katrina. I learned of Katrina, in fact, when people came to ask to use the phone to contact their relatives in NOLA. (Read on&#8230;) <span class='read-more'><a href="http://ideas.4brad.com/playa-phone-burning-man">&nbsp;read&nbsp;more&nbsp;&raquo;</a></span></p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/playa-phone-burning-man#commentsBurning ManTelecomburning manThu, 08 Sep 2005 11:32:33 -0700brad265 at http://ideas.4brad.comVoices to the Playa -- Voice mails left for Burning Man folkshttp://ideas.4brad.com/voices-playa-voice-mails-left-burning-man-folks
<p>Last year at Burning Man, I built a free <a href="http://www.templetons.com/pq/">phone booth</a> out on the desert. Using VoIP, 802.11, batteries and a satellite uplink, it sat there on the playa floor and let you make free calls anywhere in the world. I blogged about that story, but there was an untold part of the story. <img align=right src=http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm04/phone/thumb/img_8932.jpg /></p>
<p>The phone had a number that outsiders could call, and they did, and sometimes people there answered. If not they left voice mail. The voice mail told them to describe the target of their message and offer a bribe to the listener to deliver it. Alas, due to technical problems, we never really got an active system in place to deliver the voice mails, but people still left some. Recently I pulled them out and listend, and they are great fun, especially if you know Burning Man.</p>
<p>Within the mails are calls of love from moms, little kids, dads, lovers and
friends. There&#8217;s a joke (I hope) firing from a boss and a proposal of
marriage. There&#8217;s a hurricane warning and many descriptions that
could never have found their target in our giant city (&#8220;She&#8217;s a blonde
camped along 4:30 I think.&#8221;) Also fun are the offered bribes to
deliver the messages.</p>
<p>Since everybody knew they were leaving a message for any random stranger to hear, I think it&#8217;s fine to have them on the web.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think you have to be an ember to enjoy these. Just imagine the context of an entire city of 40,000 people with one phone, one voice mail, and people trying to get messages in.</p>
<p>They can be heard at this <a href="http://www.templetons.com/pq/burn-voicemail">page of Burning man voice mails</a>. You can either read the short summaries to pick the best voicemails, or like me, just listen to them raw from the combined file or ZIP archive.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/voices-playa-voice-mails-left-burning-man-folks#commentsBest Of BlogBurning Manburning manMon, 27 Jun 2005 10:54:18 -0700brad235 at http://ideas.4brad.comBurning Man photos: Galleries up, new Decompression gallery addedhttp://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000145.html
<p>Well, a couple of weeks ago when I announced the phone project at Burning Man, I implicitly was linking to my new galleries for Burning Man 2004. However, let me officially announce those galleries now, plus the addition of a new gallery today.</p>
<ul>
<li>The <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/pano/bman04.html" rel="nofollow">Giant Panoramas for 2004<a / rel="nofollow">, this year from a cherry picker.</p>
<li>The <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm04" / rel="nofollow">Regular Burning Man photos</a>, with a popular new gallery of aerial shots.
<li>The new gallery with photos of the <a href="http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm04/decomp" / rel="nofollow">Burning Man Decompression</a> party, a micro-Burning-Man that took place yesterday in San Francisco.
<li>A new <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/burn" / rel="nofollow">Burning Man Index Page</a> with links to all my Burning Man pages and photos.
</ul>
<p>Enjoy</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000145.html#commentsBurning ManPhotographyburning manMon, 11 Oct 2004 12:10:07 -0700brad144 at http://ideas.4brad.com802.11/SIP/Satellite free phone booth at Burning Manhttp://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000133.html
<p><img hspace=9 align=right src=http://www.templetons.com/pq/Thumb-playaphone.jpg>One core reason I haven't blogged much in the last while is the flurry of activity regarding my annual trip to Burning Man. I've prepared a page about one of my too-many projects this year, which was to build an incongruous phone kiosk in the middle of the desert which worked and let you call anybody in the world for free. It was battery powered, and used 802.11 and Voice over IP combined with a satellite internet connection.</p>
<p>The reaction was remarkable and I have made a set of pages about <a href=http://www.templetons.com/pq/>phone booth and reaction to it.</a> including pages on the building of it, galleries of photos of people using it (including, of course, naked people) and maps of all the places people called.</p>
<p>(I will probably submit this to slashdot next week to test my server!)</p>
<p>Now my goal was to take some highly familiar technology and put it in a place where it seemed impossible. And indeed, most people refused to believe it was "real" since there are other joke phone booths at Burning Man. Their disbelief and shock were what made it fun, as well as the emotional experiences and gratitude that came when people heard distant voices. It was a taste, in a small way, of what the phone meant when it was new.</p>
<p>I have much more stuff about Burning Man to blog in the days to come.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000133.html#commentsBest Of BlogBurning ManTelecomburning manThu, 16 Sep 2004 08:56:57 -0700brad132 at http://ideas.4brad.comHints on living on 12v power and batterieshttp://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000119.html
<p>Not really an invention, but I wrote up a nice article on <a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/burn-power.html" rel="nofollow">living on 12 volt power without much generator use</a> off the grid at Burning Man. Nothing really new, just some experience and advice, but I'm blogging it for those interested in the topic.</p>
http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000119.html#commentsBurning ManRandom Ideasburning manSat, 31 Jul 2004 18:26:22 -0700brad118 at http://ideas.4brad.com